A Vast Ocean of Crap

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I was going to do this whole rant on how lyrics for today’s crappy pop songs have lines like ” I rolled outta my car, into the kitchen and opened a bottle of Cristal”, but then I couldn’t find any (lyrics.com you let me down).

My rant was going to go on about songs sounding like to-do lists these days and crappy pop songs from the 90’s were just nonsense and I was a-okay with nonsense. Then I found Summertime from Will Smith and my whole theory got shot to shit.

“It’s late in the day and I ain’t been on the court yet
Hustle to the mall to get me a short set
Yeah I got on sneaks but I need a new pair
Cause basketball courts in the summer got girls there
The temperature’s about 88
Hop in the water plug just for old times sake
Break to ya crib change your clothes once more
Cause you’re invited to a barbeque that’s starting at 4…”

Now some of you may say “but wait, what about I Love It by Icona Pop – those lyrics are ridiculous and make no sense – at least the to-do list makes sense!”

Yes yes, but you really have to admire a song that is culled straight from Horse ebooks tweets. Those girls are geniuses!

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Pooping 2 or 3 times in a day.

What is your greatest fear?
That I’ll never get laid again.
Which historical figure do you most identify with?
Well I wish I could say Elsa Maxwell – but I hate having people over to my house.

Which living person do you most admire?
Sylvester Stallone – he’s a renaissance man – wrote Rocky, actor and now a painter.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
My inability to wash the kitchen floor even though it has needed it quite badly for the last 3 months – so that would be a combo of procrastination and slothfullness – slothtination or procrathfullness.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Stupidity.
What is your greatest extravagance?
Booze.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Chastity.
When and where were you happiest?
I am always happy on a beach when the tide has gone out and you can walk wayyyyy out on the sand.

What do you dislike most about your appearance?
My hands look weird in photographs but look normal in real life.

Which living person do you most despise?
Republicans – the bad ones, not the nice ones.
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
Motherfucker.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Making people laugh.
On what occasion do you lie?
To the waiters.
Which talent would you most like to have?
Tap dancing.
What is your current state of mind?
I figured out that I am no longer a mess but now have a crick in my neck.
If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?
A pussycat. For the napping in the sunshine and the hugs.

What is your most treasured possession?
My friends.
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Being hungry and being made to go into yet another store.
What is your most marked characteristic?
Bluntness.

What do you most value in your friends?
That they continue to like me even though I am a pain in the ass.

I like to be innovative. Some people see the glass half empty – I see the glass half full. One door closes, another one opens. Let’s talk about books. With the rise of e-readers and tablets, some day in the future we will all shake our heads in wonder that we ever wasted trees by turning them into books.

The death of books will mean that the bookmobile will be put up on blocks. But I am going to give the lending library book mobile a new lease on life by rejigging it and rebranding it. The musty tomes by Sandra Brown and Shakespeare are out and bag sealers and dehydrators are in.

That’s right – now finally you can borrow that bread maker instead of being held hostage by it for the rest of your life. You only use it once a year and it seems to take up half the real estate in your lower cupboard. Why own it when you can “rent it for free” through your local public library (We now carry appliances!).

Appliances come in non-uniform, unwieldy sizes and tend to be a tad larger than books – hence the need for the ApplianceMobile. It would drive through your neighborhood once a week at a designated time and you could rush out and return the coffee grinder that you got last week and take out the meat slicer as this is “prosciutto week” at your house.

Not only can you borrow, but you can also donate. Wedding gifts such as professional meat grinders, waffle makers and egg poachers will all get a new lease on life as they wend their way through town in the ApplianceMobile! Think of how happy some home cook will be when your unloved backyard smoker rolls up and makes their dream of wood smoked chicken a reality.

You know the drill. It’s 7 on Friday night. Six of you are out for dinner, the wine has arrived and your waiter has just plunked down an assortment of bread, buns and butter onto your table.

Pumpernickel buns. Some kind of herby, whipped butter. A perfectly nice but pedestrian crusty whitebread. Why do we dive on it like a pack of ravenous dogs?

Sure, sure – we haven’t eaten since noon. And yes, we need to soak up the booze we are drinking. But I think it goes deeper than that.

It’s free. Free is good. Free is a bonus. No matter that free includes carbohydrates we wouldn’t normally consider eating and free makes us full before the scallops that we were really looking excited about eating, arrive.

Personally, I never “fill up on buns”. That said, for complete disclosure purposes, put tortilla chips and salsa in front of me and 30 seconds later and I am asking for more.

From a restaurants point of view I don’t understand it. We’re all full so no dessert. Or do free buns and addictively delicious butter mask the over priced middling fare provided? Do the carbs go to our heads? Will white flour stupor prevent us from giving 2 and half star reviews on Yelp?

Or maybe the bread/buns/butter is merely a diversion? While we are all happily chewing, in the kitchen the staff are screaming “we have more customers – again” and then run around crazily flapping their arms. They need those bread munching minutes to get their heads back in the game?

I’m going to throw this thought out there. While the whole “crazy in the kitchen” thing is going on, instead of sedating us with sugar’s evil cousin carbs, why not give us something else to do? Divert us with something like food related jumbles or crosswords? Fine dining Keno? Beaujolais bingo?

There is much to-do online about the death of the newspaper. Apparently “online” is the new “print” and any day now, newspapers as we know them, will disappear off the face of the earth.

Should we let the trees win? I say nay. Nay I say! I have compiled 8 salient points as to why we should fight tooth and nail against the demise of our beloved hand blackening, daily reading material.

1. Fires. No one who has taken two hours to cook bacon over a campfire will doubt the need of a good fire. When camping, the last thing you are looking for is kindling, dry wood or handfuls of not very damp leaves. No, for the most part you are searching for the last beer in the cooler or your car keys so you can go back into town to buy more beer. When evening rolls around and you can officially move your beer drinking from early afternoon imbibing to night time piss-tank-ery, you are going to need a fire. The bigger the better actually. You need to attract the neighbours who probably have more beer than you do. Newspaper is a lifesaver in this instance. Your pitiful attempts at firewood collecting will go unnoticed when you keep your flame going with artfully twisted newspaper. The Sunday Supplement will add some colourful bursts to an already cheery blaze.

2. Moving. Your precious objects are breakable and when you move you need to protect them from ham fisted moving men who delight in nothing more than dropping boxes and shattering object d’art. Newspapers fit lovingly around most things, be they round or square and they temper the jostling that occurs when being driven to and/or fro. Be warned though, there is a rumour that the Crockery Cartel is in cahoots with the trees to eliminate newspapers. You heard it here first.

3. Riots. As any good bandwagon jumper knows, sports playoffs bring that magical event known as a riot. Your team wins – it’s an excellent opportunity to flip over police cars and steal reasonably priced ink-jet printers. You can also jump atop your nearest newspaper box and wave the pennant of your team in the face of supporters of the losers. Or wave about a burning effigy of the opposing teams’ most famous player. Height = good during a riot and your trusty newspaper box is there to make you taller and thereby “better” than your fellow revelers. It is also an excellent position from which to have your photo snapped for the local paper as an example of “what’s wrong with this country”.

4. Wind Storms. You go to bed at night and have fitful dreams only to wake up in the morning to see that there has been a wind storm which explains why you dreamt about flying monkeys, flying cows and funnel shaped objects. Your indication of a windstorm? The newspaper is scattered on your front lawn, the sidewalk and stuck in your neighbours’ privet hedge where it will remain for 6 months as your neighbour Gary is a lazy S.O.B. What other signs of a windstorm could there be? Litter strewn about? Fallen branches? They appeared via childish pranks that happen to coincide with the windstorm.

5. Paper Mache. The art of gluing newspaper strips over a balloon to make it into a mask or a bunny rabbit is used universally by teachers to avoid actually teaching any real world skills to children 10 and under. It’s also cheap and covers up the fact that cash strapped schools no longer have music, chemistry and geography classes. Busy, gluey children have less time to analyze their matriculation options. Should newspapers disappear, it is unlikely that paper mache would continue as everyone knows the prices for quality tissue paper and gauze without holes have hit all time highs. God help us if the International Chicken Wire Consortium (ICWC) is successful in bringing down the balloon industry. Will no one think of the children???

6. New Store Opening. The restaurant on the corner has gone bust. But you know that something new is going in as its windows are covered by that most tantalizing of visual minxes – the newspaper. Why someone would open another new restaurant in that location is beyond you as this makes the 3rd, no 4th, restaurant in that space in as many years. This time it may be different, if that glimpse through the rip in the paper 3 feet left of the door is any indication. If they’d left the windows bare and you could see them retrofitting the bathrooms or fishing the rat out of the refurbished deep fryer, you might not be so keen. But their jauntily papered over windows tells you that this time, it’s a winner.

7. Dishwasher overflow. Your spouse is a lovely person and very smart if that PHD at the end of their name is any indication. You continue to be baffled why they cannot tell the difference between dish soap and dishwasher detergent. As the water pours out onto the floor yet again and the seemingly endless parade of bubbles begins to take over your kitchen, you consider divorce. Newspapers to the rescue. As they literally sop up the water, they figuratively absorb all the negative energy you were shooting at your life partner. Can towels do that? Don’t make me laugh.

8. The Bus. Too often on the bus you are sitting opposite someone else. As you look out the window you may inadvertently make eye contact with that person or look at their crotch. Or look at their crotch and then make eye contact. Whatever the scenario, it’s all bad. The newspaper is the balm that soothes an otherwise irritating bus ride that is fraught with inadvertent and advertent eye and crotch contact. You can hide behind the newspaper and immerse yourself in celebrity gossip, horoscopes and the adverts for Lasik eye surgery and arrive at the office refreshed and ready to tackle your day.

So there you have it. 8 good reasons to lobby all of your local and federal politicians to keep the newspaper alive.

In my neighbourhood, there is always construction. Some fool is always ripping down a perfectly nice house to put up an eyesore or renovating with jack hammers and hand grenades.

Along with construction comes construction workers. Parked outside my house every morning, is a plethora of heavy duty trucks that are more suited to carting around bear carcasses than a nail gun and a hard hat.

What strikes me as odd about these trucks is that they are clean. Not just regular around town clean which means dusty, I mean really clean. Like they’ve been cleaned by toothbrushes. Like if the sun hits the chrome you better be wearing sunglasses because you’re gonna go blind!

So this bad boy was parked outside the other day and my first thought was “there is a very lonely woman crying at home somewhere”. It seems to me that a lot of care and attention when into making this perfectly clean white truck, perfectly clean.

What kind of masochist buys a white truck? I think that the owner if this truck is avoiding said woman at home and bought a white truck ON PURPOSE knowing that he could lavish all his love and attention on it. He curses when the bumper gets dirty. He caresses its clean lines and pleasing upholstery. He gets stroppy with people who don’t clean their shoes before getting into the truck.

Maybe he is a pig at home and his therapist suggested a white truck and some Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to help balance it out. Ying and yang as it were.

Or maybe she’s having an affair and she bought him a white truck to give him a hobby and get him out of the house. “C’mon over Richard. He’s out at the car wash…again!” she says with a tinkly laugh.

Dale said “let’s take the ferry to the island”. Laura and Natalie couldn’t go as they’d used all their vacation time and had to work the next day.

It’s a snooze fest. Clearly, if my friends would change their names to something cooler, my life would be way more interesting, as would they.

It could be “Ace drove an old school 70’s Mercedes” instead of “Scott didn’t like heights”. Or “Pixi had a huge tramp stamp that she enjoyed flashing during yoga class” rather than “Julie rode her bike to work every day”.

Chopper, Ace, Pixi, Zee Zee and Simone are badasses with trust funds that have daily adventures.

They’re not middle class wage slaves who are excited by new Merrell walking shoes.

Chopper lived in a refurbed Airstream trailer that he parked in Coco’s driveway. She put up with his shit because he made her laugh with pronouncements like “you do know that Ace has one very, hairy ball?”

Get with the program people and give me something to work with. If you won’t change your name then at least get a handle like “One Eyed Ryan” or “Crazy Jill”. That’s autobiographical gold.

Update: My friend Harriet Funky P took umbrage with the comment that none of my friends have cool names as she clearly does. Dear H.F.P, I stand corrected.